Ben Shapiro writes: In the aftermath of Saturday’s Charlottesville, Virginia chaos — a physically violent conflict between disgusting white supremacist alt-right thugs and repulsive Antifa thugs, which culminated in a murderous attack by an apparent alt-righter on the Antifa crowd and other miscellaneous counter-protesters, resulting in the death of one person and injuries to another 19 — the hot takes have been coming fast and furious.

Here are some of the things you need to know about the awful events of yesterday.

1. The Alt-Right Is Not Conservative. One of the hottest takes from the Left is that the alt-right represents the entire right — that what happened in Charlottesville, Virginia represented conservatives broadly. That’s factually incorrect, and intellectually dishonest. The alt-right is not just conservatives who like memes or who dislike Paul Ryan. The alt-right is a philosophy of white supremacy and white nationalism espoused by the likes of Vox Day, Richard Spencer, and Jared Taylor.

Here’s Jared Taylor explaining the alt-right:

They openly acknowledge their antipathy for the Constitution and conservatism; they believe that strong centralized government is necessary to preserve “white civilization.” They label all their enemies “cucks” — men in favor of “race-mixing.” Here’s a solid guide to what the alt-right actually thinks.

2. The Alt-Right Has Successfully Created The Impression There Are Lots Of Them. There Aren’t. Thanks to the hard work of alt-right apologists like Milo Yiannopoulos, the widespread perception has been created that the alt-right is a movement on the rise, with a fast-increasing number of devotees. The media have glommed onto the alt-right in order to smear the entire conservative movement with it. The alt-right is quite active online — according to the Anti-Defamation League, I was their top journalistic target in 2016, and I received nearly 8,000 anti-Semitic tweets during the election cycle — but they aren’t particularly large. They fill up comments sections at sites like Breitbart, and they email spam, and they prank call people, and they live on 4chan boards, but the vast majority of alt-right anti-Semitic tweets came from just 1,600 accounts.

Thanks, however, to their online vociferousness, they convinced members of the Trump campaign, apparently including the president, that it was important not to knock them.

3. The Alt-Right Has Been Tut-Tutted By President Trump And His Advisors For Over A Year. Yesterday Was Nothing New. President Trump’s initial response to the attack in Charlottesville made no mention of the alt-right or white supremacy or even of racism. He simply stated, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides. Read the rest of this entry »

Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state.

Devlin Barrett reports: As federal agents prepare to scour roughly 650,000 emails to see how many relate to a prior probe of Hillary Clinton’s email use, the surprise disclosure that investigators were pursuing the potential new evidence lays bare building tensions inside the bureau and the Justice Department over how to investigate the Democratic presidential nominee.

“The FBI had searched the computer while looking for child pornography, people familiar with the matter said, but the warrant they used didn’t give them authority to search for matters related to Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending explicit or indecent messages to the teenager.”

Metadata found on the laptop used by former Rep. Anthony Weiner and his estranged wife Huma Abedin, a close Clinton aide, suggests there may be thousands of emails sent to or from the private server that Mrs. Clinton used while she was secretary of state, according to people familiar with the matter. It will take weeks, at a minimum, to determine whether those messages are work-related from the time Ms. Abedin served with Mrs. Clinton at the State Department; how many are duplicates of emails already reviewed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and whether they include either classified information or important new evidence in the Clinton email probe.

“In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.”

The new investigative effort, disclosed by FBI Director James Comey on Friday, shows a bureau at times in sharp internal disagreement over matters related to the Clintons, and how to handle those matters fairly and carefully in the middle of a national election campaign. Even as the previous probe of Mrs. Clinton’s email use wound down in July, internal disagreements within the bureau and the Justice Department surrounding the Clintons’ family philanthropy heated up, according to people familiar with the matter.

The latest development began in early October when New York-based FBI officials notified Andrew McCabe, the bureau’s second-in-command, that while investigating Mr. Weiner for possibly sending sexually charged messages to a minor, they had recovered a laptop with 650,000 emails. Many, they said, were from the accounts of Ms. Abedin, according to people familiar with the matter.

Those emails stretched back years, these people said, and were on a laptop that hadn’t previously come up in the Clinton email probe. Ms. Abedin said in late August that the couple were separating.

The FBI had searched the computer while looking for child pornography, people familiar with the matter said, but the warrant they used didn’t give them authority to search for matters related to Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement at the State Department. Mr. Weiner has denied sending explicit or indecent messages to the teenager.

“At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said.”

In their initial review of the laptop, the metadata showed many messages, apparently in the thousands, that were either sent to or from the private email server at Mrs. Clinton’s home that had been the focus of so much investigative effort for the FBI. Senior FBI officials decided to let the Weiner investigators proceed with a closer examination of the metadata on the computer, and report back to them.

At a meeting early last week of senior Justice Department and FBI officials, a member of the department’s senior national-security staff asked for an update on the Weiner laptop, the people familiar with the matter said. At that point, officials realized that no one had acted to obtain a warrant, these people said. Read the rest of this entry »

David Rutz reports: CNN host Jake Tapper used the “buried lead” of his show Thursday to blast the State Department for its deception surrounding an intentional video deletion from a December 2013 briefing, saying it should “outrage every American.”

“It’s literally someone at the State Department trying to bury something, hiding it from you. In this case, it was an acknowledgment by the Obama administration of having lied to reporters, a scrubbing of the public record, and it should outrage every American.”

State Department spokesman John Kirby admitted Wednesday that a staffer deliberately edited out video from the briefing of an unflattering exchange regarding Obama administration talks with Iran.

“It’s literally someone at the State Department trying to bury something, hiding it from you,” Tapper said. “In this case, it was an acknowledgment by the Obama administration of having lied to reporters, a scrubbing of the public record, and it should outrage every American.”

“We learned that there was a deliberate request, that this wasn’t a technical glitch. This was a deliberate request to excise video.”

— State Department spokesman John Kirby

In step-by-step fashion, Tapper laid out to viewers three different lies told by members of the agency. It started when former spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told Fox News reporter James Rosenin February 2013 that there had been no direct talks between Iran and the United States, when they in fact had been going on for months.

In December of 2013, Rosen pointed out to new spokeswoman Jen Psaki that the U.S. had engaged in bilateral talks with Iran earlier in the administration, as acknowledged by Psaki herself.

…Any foreign intelligence service worth its salt would have had no trouble accessing Ms. Clinton’s emails, particularly when they were unencrypted, as this column has explained in detail. Yet Hillary was more worried about the American public finding out about what she was up to via FOIA than what foreign spy services and hackers might see in her email.

What she was seeking to hide so ardently remains one of the big unanswered questions in EmailGate. Hints may be found in the recent announcement that Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, the former head of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime Clinton intimate, is under FBI investigation for financial misdeeds, specifically dirty money coming from China. In fact, Mr. McAulliffe invited one of his Beijing benefactors over to Ms. Clinton’s house in 2013. Not long after, Chinese investors donated $2 million to the Clinton Foundation.

That an illegal pay-for-play-scheme, with donations to the Clinton Foundation being rewarded by political favors from Hillary Clinton—who when she was secretary of state had an enormous ability to grant favors to foreign bidders—existed at the heart of EmailGate has been widely suspected, and we know the FBI is investigating this case as political corruption, not just for mishandling of classified information….

…Even The Washington Post, hardly a member of the VRWC, has conceded that EmailGate is a certifiably big deal, and “badly complicates Clinton’s past explanations about the server.” Its editors went further, issuing a blistering statement castigating Ms. Clinton’s “inexcusable, willful disregard of the rules.” They minced no words: “Ms. Clinton had plenty of warnings to use official government communications methods, so as to make sure that her records were properly preserved and to minimize cybersecurity risks. She ignored them.”

Although Post editors were at pains to state that Ms. Clinton had not broken any laws with her gross negligence at Foggy Bottom, the issue remains open.

Wednesday’s release of the State Department’s Inspector General emphasized Clinton’s violation of internal email policies, but Levin went right to the core of the matter explaining that these “policies” are in place because of federal law:

“You’ve heard by now, Hillary Clinton violated email rules. What? There’s email rules? Thats how Politico headlined their breaking story. ‘State Dept watchdog: Clinton violated email rules.’ No. She didn’t violate email rules, she violated federal law. ‘The State Department Inspector General concluded that hc didn’t comply with the agency’s policy on records.’ Guilty. GUILTY! She’s guilty of violating a federal law. It’s not just the State Department that comes up with these policies. These policies are put in plac to undergird the federal records act.”

“Americans have voted with their dollars and bought record levels of guns and ammunition.”

The all-time record for yearly sales comes after May, June, July, August, September, October, November, and December 2015 each set sales records for their respective months. In December the FBI conducted 3,314,594 checks, an increase of more than half a million checks over the previous single-month record set in December 2012.

The number of FBI background checks is widely considered to be the most reliable gauge of how many firearms were sold in a given month because background checks are required on all sales made through federally licensed firearms dealers. However, the checks do not provide an exhaustive representation of gun sales. Checks are not required on sales between private parties in most states, and a single background check may cover the purchase of multiple firearms by the same person at once.

Additionally, some states perform the checks on those who apply for gun-carry permits.

A Power Derived From Mistrust of Police and Government

Glenn Harlan Reynolds writes: Is the gun lobby still invincible? Yeah, pretty much. The reason is trust. And if you want more trust, police and politicians must be more trustworthy.

In 2012, Room for Debate asked ”Is the Gun Lobby Invincible?” Since then, the answer has turned out to be “yeah, pretty much.” And the reason is trust.

According to a recent Pew poll, more Americans support gun rights than gun control. That represents a significant shift over the situation a few decades ago. And I believe the reason is that people don’t trust the government to protect them anymore, and, in fact, that they don’t trust the government in general….(read more)

USA said the decision to postpone was made because the finale ‘contains a graphic scene similar in nature to today’s tragic events in Virginia.’

Cynthia Littleton reports: USA Network has postponed tonight’s scheduled season finale of hacker drama series “Mr. Robot” for a week because the episode includes a scene with similarities to the real-life murders that occurred on live TV this morning in Virginia.

“Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers, we are postponing tonight’s episode. Our thoughts go out to all those affected during this difficult time,” USA said in a statement.

Early today, a reporter, Alison Parker, and cameraman, Adam Ward, for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, Va., were shot and killed while delivering a live report for the station’s morning news program. The suspected killer is a former co-worker of the pair who posted video of the ambush on social media after fleeing the scene.

“Out of respect to the victims, their families and colleagues, and our viewers, we are postponing tonight’s episode. Our thoughts go out to all those affected during this difficult time.”

She interned at the station that summer and returned in May 2014 as a morning reporter, New York Daily News reports. Parker had been dating the station’s evening co-anchor Chris Hurst. Hurst shared his grief on Twitter.

How Alison Parker & Adam Ward should be remembered instead of the horrific video [via New York Daily News] pic.twitter.com/KoNjJOqr7k

“You know, Maryland talks about their crabs. And if anyone from Maryland is listening, I’m going to be very clear: All the crabs are born here in Virginia and they end up, because of the current, being taken there. So really they should be Virginia crabs.”

— Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe

His statement is not entirely false, though saying the current is the only reason some crabs migrate into the upper bay is questionable.

“Juggernauts are only juggernauts as long as they stay looking like juggernauts…”

Hillary Clinton supporters should take note of defeats such as House majority leader Eric Cantor’s and realize no candidate is inevitable, particularly following her less-than-stellar book tour thus far, said Ken Cuccinelli. Cuccinelli, the 2013 Virginia Republican gubernatorial candidate and recently announced Senate Conservatives Fund president, said presumed candidates have struggled as of late as voters look for a change…(read more)

Bob Grabowski (right) said his office is the first one complete at PTR Industries in the Cool Springs Business Park on Tuesday, Jan. 7, 2013. PTR Industries is a gun manufacturing company that moved from Connecticut. Grabowski is also an Horry County councilman. Photo by Janet Blackmon Morgan / jblackmon@thesunnews.com

AWRHawkins reports: What started as a slow trickle when American Tactical Imports (ATI) and PTR moved from the northeast to South Carolina, has now become an all out surge with Magpul Industries leaving Colorado, Beretta leaving Maryland for Tennessee, and Remington acquiring a 500,000 square ft. facility in Alabama.

In early 2013 Magpul made it clear they were leaving Colorado if the state’s Democrat legislators passed a ban on “high capacity” magazines. The legislators passed the ban anyway, and on January 2, 2014 Breitbart News reported that Magpul was moving manufacturing to Wyoming and its corporate headquarters to Texas.

Jim Swift writes: A 2008 documentary reveals that Terry McAuliffe, who is being sworn in today as governor of Virginia, thinks that members of the Bush family “should all have been put away in jail.”

The documentary, Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story, features a clip of President George H.W. Bush’s 1989 Inaugural Address, where Bush discusses the need to “make kinder the face of the nation” with regard to “those who cannot free themselves of enslavement to whatever addiction—drugs, welfare, the demoralization that rules the slums.”

President Obama (right) waves to members of the audience after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative with former President Bill Clinton in New York on Sept. 24, 2013. (Associated Press) Photo by: Pablo Martinez Monsivais

I’ve had this understanding, as well, that the Democratic party’s realignment when Obama leaves office, won’t be a smooth one. Obama’s shaped the party into his image, rather than the other way around. Democrats, including Democrats in the media, have been unusually loyal and uncritical, even sacrificing their careers in some cases, in order to remain united behind their leader. Their fictionalized view of Obama’s historic legacy will begin to collapse.

When they no longer have to hide their frustration with this narcissistic, hostile, divisive president, and begin individually posturing for power–without his image to protect–the Democratic party will have their own costly wars to fight. Their traditional weaknesses and conflicts will be more fully revealed.

People underestimate the Democratic party’s natural state of disunity. Think the Republicans are fractured? The Democratic civil war is about to begin. –Butcher

Charles Hurt writes: Despite what the hysterical media will tell you, those distant blasts you heard last week rolling from New York City to Richmond were not cannon fire from the ongoing civil war within the Republican Party. They were the first shots fired in the civil war that is about to break wide open within the Democratic Party.

The hyperventilating media have gone from simply jaundiced sideline observers to outright cheerleaders, breathlessly fanning the flames of discord within the GOP at every turn. Who knew The New York Times cares so much about Republican politicians from Texas and Utah? Of course, they don’t. Unless those conservative Texans and Utahans are in a knife fight with establishment Republicans in Washington.

John Hayward writes: The Virginia governor’s race was yet another example of the massive voting gap in a huge demographic: single people, particularly single women. According to exit polls, Republican Ken Cuccinelli won handily on the “hard” issues facing Virginia voters, and won most other demographic slices, but Democrat Terry McAuliffe won big with single people, crushing Cuccinelli by nearly fifty points among single women.

A similar dynamic could be observed in the 2012 presidential race, where the Obama campaign made a very concerted effort to win over single women – so concerted that it sometimes appeared ludicrously clumsy to critics. Rush Limbaugh recalled the much-lampooned “Life of Julia” web ad on his radio show Thursday, in which an imaginary single gal lives her entire life with the assistance of cradle-to-grave Obama social programs… but never the slightest hint of a husband, even when she has a child.

Rarely has such obvious pandering been flung at a targeted demographic by the shovelful, but evidently the single female demographic doesn’t mind obvious pandering. It seems impossible to patronize them to the point of irritation, not even during the equally ridiculous Sandra Fluke saga, in which the nominal cost of birth control was transformed into a civil-rights tragedy by a professional activist posing as a student… an activist who later admitted she didn’t know how much birth control actually cost, after rising to fame for touting a figure that was about 1000 percent high. The whole thing was comically, transparently artificial, but it worked like a charm. Read the rest of this entry »

Roger L Simon writes: I have no idea if Republicans will end their circular firing squad and unite sufficiently to right our country, but one thing seems abundantly clear from the events of the last weeks, including Tuesday’s election in which Terry McAuliffe barely eked out a victory over the unexciting Ken Cuccinelli. Liberalism in our country is in a more precarious position than ever. It may not even really exist.

Liberalism as practiced in today’s America is a chimera, not actually an ideology but an alliance of interest groups controlled by elites for the preservation of their (the elites’) wealth and power. The interest groups often seem to be working against their own advantage by being so affiliated (e. g. African-Americans are in the worst shape in years under Obama), but not the elites who have been able to thrive. These elites are also able to appear altruistic to themselves and others while behaving in manners that are hideously selfish and atrocious to the common good. Liberalism is not so much an ideology in our society as it is a shield, a defense mechanism for a lifestyle.

This accounts, in part, for all the lying and bumbling in the face of the Obamacare debacle from the president on down to his hapless porte-paroles Jay Carney and Deborah Wasserman-Schultz (who apparently is so flummoxed she cannot pronounce the word “misled”). None of them ever knew what the healthcare legislation was in the first place in anything approximating serious detail. That would have been been too much of a bother when it was just a pose. It was never really about people’s health anyway — it was for show. Read the rest of this entry »

When the facts are considered in the slim victory that terribly flawed Democrat Terry McAuliffe had against Ken Cuccinelli, it’s hard to deny the conclusion that the Republican party decided it was better to abandon Virginia to the Democrat party than to allow the Tea Party and social conservatives to win.

A major Democratic Party benefactor and Obama campaign bundler helped pay for professional petition circulators responsible for getting Virginia Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Robert C. Sarvis on the ballot — a move that could split conservative votes in a tight race.

Campaign finance records show the Libertarian Booster PAC has made the largest independent contribution to Sarvis’ campaign, helping to pay for professional petition circulators who collected signatures necessary to get Sarvis’ name on Tuesday’s statewide ballot.

ARLINGTON, VA – NOVEMBER 03: Supporters for Republican gubernatorial candidate for Virginia Ken Cuccinelli protest outside a campaign stop of Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe at Washington-Lee High School November 3, 2013 in Arlington, Virginia. President Barack Obama participated in the event with McAuliffe as the campaign urged Virginians to vote on Tuesday.

The Sign Reads: Obama lied. Your insurance died. Your Doc is gone. What more could go wrong??? Terry McCauliffe could be governor.

W. James Antle III writes: Next week Virginians will head to the polls to elect a new governor. It is a race that, on paper, Republicans should win. But the paper the polls are printed on says otherwise.

The GOP standard-bearer is Ken Cuccinelli, a prominent conservative who hails from the critical Northern Virginia suburbs—he lives in Prince William County and was elected to the state legislature from Fairfax County—and won the attorney general’s race with 58 percent of the vote just four years ago. His constitutional challenge to Obamacare did not prevail at the Supreme Court, but it would seem at least somewhat vindicated by the law’s metastasizing implementation problems. Read the rest of this entry »

Ted Johnson reports: It may be at least a year before Hillary Clinton announces if she will run for president in 2016, but in the next few weeks, her presence in Los Angeles and Hollywood may be as busy as her last bid for the White House.

On Wednesday, she is scheduled to headline a $15,000-per-person fundraising luncheon for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe at the home of media mogul Haim Saban and his wife Cheryl. That evening, she is scheduled to speak at the environmental org Oceana’s Partners Award Gala at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, with a long list of politically active entertainment figures among those who are chairing the event. Read the rest of this entry »

George Will writes: When William F. Buckley, running as the Conservative Party’s candidate for mayor of New York in 1965, was asked what he would do if he won, he replied: “Demand a recount.” Robert Sarvis, Libertarian Party candidate for governor of Virginia, will not need to do this.

“Good to see everybody!” McAuliffe said before being driven away from Clinton’s home in a black SUV on Monday night.

(Grae Stafford/Daily Caller)

The Democratic nominee for governor declined to answer questions from The Daily Caller about the Virginians likely to be furloughed in a government shutdown. An estimated 150,000 Virginians are likely to be affected.

Despite the shutdown threat, a Who’s Who of national Democrats (and a deer) still attended the fundraiser at the invitation of the former Secretary of State, First Lady and likely 2016 presidential candidate. Read the rest of this entry »

The NRA’s “Friends of NRA” campaign has raised a record breaking amount of money so far this year. “Friends of NRA” is one of the group’s grassroots efforts, sponsoring volunteer events and fundraising banquets around the country.

According to Richmond’s WTVR.com, the program has already raised $51 million, with “more than 200 fundraising events left in 2013.” The amount raised in the first eight and a half months of 2013 is already $1 million more than the entire amount raised in 2012.

What does this say to gubernatorial candidates like Terry McAuliffe, who openly pledge to put Colorado-like gun controls in place if elected?

And what does this portend for pro-gun control Senators who have been fortunate enough to be elected in anti-gun control states? Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kay Hagan (D-NC) come to mind. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Jonah Goldberg’s column (and current book) his good-humored, scholarly, pop-culture-savy approach to the often dreadful business of exposing liberalism’s falsehoods never fail to entertain. It’s rare to see Goldberg’s temperature rise. This column is an exception. I can almost see the veins popping out on his forehead. –The Butcher

Jonah Goldberg writes: Some of you may recall this scornful column I wrote the other week mocking the myth that there’s anything socially libertarian about liberalism. If not, you might recall a couple dozen Corner posts on the same theme. It is easily one of my biggest peeves in politics. But there is something worse than lying about being a libertarian on social issues. It’s lying about being a libertarian on economic issues.

I haven’t been following the Virginia gubernatorial race too closely, but I managed to catch the last few minutes of the debate last night. Chuck Todd asked the candidates whether they think the Redskins should keep their name. Terry McAuliffe responded: “I don’t think the governor ought to be telling private businesses what they should do about their business.”

“Even if it’s offensive to people?” Todd interjected.

“I don’t think the governor should be telling private businesses . . .” McAuliffe repeated. Todd interrupted. Asking what his personal opinion was. McAuliffe stuck to his bogus answer: “As governor, I’m not going to tell Dan Snyder or anybody else what they should [do] with their business, and I want to congratulate the Redskins, because I went down to the training practice here in Richmond and it is spectacular.”

Now, in what way is this remotely true? Don’t get me wrong, I think McAuliffe’s answer is basically right. And for all I know he won’t pressure the Redskins to change their name. But is that because he’s the sort of guy who doesn’t tell businesses what they should do? Or is it because he’s the sort of guy who says what audiences want to hear about their beloved football franchise? If the question was about businesses that refuse to comply with Obamacare’s requirement to pay for birth control, would he still be the sort of guy who doesn’t think politicians should be telling businesses what to do? Is he for no environmental regulations? Against all zoning? Is he now against civil-rights laws that tell business who. they must serve, hire, etc.? Read the rest of this entry »